“Have you shifted to Jurassic Park and you don’t see calls or emails? No WhatsApp either? Thought you are a product of the bygone era of the dinosaur regime!”

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I must have sounded totally bugged up to Rajan Mishra, vice president of a 50-crore plastic pump manufacturing unit, when I was trying to get in touch with him since three days with no response to any means. Rajan is polite but totally unkempt when it comes to scheduling his time effectively.

Always too much to do and not enough time: What actually happens is the failure to distinguish ‘urgent’ from ‘important,’ an age-old formulae. You turn up getting dragged into email responses which need not be responded to immediately. A colleague pressurises you to keep talking into his agenda of urgency and you succumb. The reason, partly, to blame is overwhelming situations, which lead to stress. With that the ability to differentiate fades off.

The solution here is to just be a little ‘self-centered’ and see what is the real deadline for you. Don’t be that hamster on the wheel, running entire day and getting nowhere.

Simple solution: Do you remember the Bingo advertisement? Turn the triangle-shaped chips in three-different directions and everyone starts sweating over it. Funny as it is but its also true in the real world. People spend a long time in unproductive meetings and tend to lose sight of simple solutions to complex problems.

A leading pharmaceutical company wanted to reduce the time people used to take in coming back from tea breaks. They would go out of office to a roadside tea vendor and then wouldn’t come back soon. No one wanted a premixed machine vending tea either. Next?

The company hired the same roadside tea vendor and there was an option of standing on the rooftop and having tea in the fresh air, albeit paid by employees as earlier. To access the rooftop tea stall, one had to use their login cards giving the clear time of arrival and departure. The tea-break time was cut by 92% now.

When we are overloaded, the tendency is to duck the work. We stop looking at unconventional yet simple ways of solving the issue at hand. It is called ‘tunnel vision’. To break this and to find simplified solutions, it’s important to look at the problem at hand and think as if it does not belong to you. It is someone else’s issue and you are just suggesting solutions. That is sure to work.

Set a system: A very interesting study done in the psychology department of Arizona university says that when we are tired than we keep repeating mundane tasks. They are easy and okay to delegate but we do not. Why? Over a period, we get used to a routine. It turns into a rut without us realising. Our problems become recurrent and the problem solving too finds a repetitive pattern.

Ever thought why you keep forgetting paying bills on time, leave chargers or spectacles in hotel rooms, forget passwords and keep postponing small-to-do stuff at home?

That is because there is no system set from the first goof up.

Simple solutions could be setting up a reminder on the app, creating a packing list to tally with at hotel rooms and using a digital smart lock for passwords. When we are always busy, there are more reasons than work alone. Being overloaded makes you have a strong tendency to run away from everything that demands thinking. That leads to anxiety and avoidance. Remember, how many times you have said yes to an invitation and never made it there.

Have you found yourself binge-watching television knowing that you need to sleep or finish some task at hand? That is avoidance. A clear result of being too tied up but not necessarily meaningfully.

Give yourself some time. Be kind to self and remember that you are not a rat. So any rat race will keep you at being that rat.

By, Rama Moondra
(The writer is strategic advisor and premium educator with Harvard Business Publishing)

Source: DNA Money